Mary Phelps Jacob

U.S. Patent 1,115,674, a "Backless Brassiere" granted in November 1914, belonged to Mary Phelps Jacob, a New York socialite who later sold it to the Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1892, she is better known in literary history as Caresse Crosby, the Paris publisher, and she died in Rome in 1970.

Two handkerchiefs and a ribbon

By her own account, Jacob made her first brassiere in 1910 while dressing for a dance. Her corset showed through a sheer evening gown, so she improvised a replacement from two pocket handkerchiefs, pink ribbon, a needle, thread and pins. The result was soft, short and left the back almost bare.

The story was hers, told years later, and dates differ between accounts. What can be checked is the paperwork that followed.

Patent 1,115,674

She filed for a patent on February 12, 1914, and it was granted that November as U.S. Patent 1,115,674. The design was a light bust support without boning, meant to sit under the low evening necklines of the day. It anticipated the low-backed shapes that a backless bra still has to solve.

It was not the first bust support. In Paris, Herminie Cadolle had patented her two-piece corselet-gorge in 1889, and bust bodices of several kinds were on sale in Europe and America before 1914. Jacob's patent mattered because of the company that bought it.

A Boston workshop and the $1,500 sale

Jacob set up the Fashion Form Brassiere Company on Washington Street in Boston, which Wikipedia's account describes as a two-woman sweatshop. It never reached real production. She sold the patent to the Warner Brothers Corset Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for $1,500. Accounts differ on the year of the sale.

Warner's is credited with earning more than $15 million from the patent over the following thirty years. Whatever the exact figure, the price was small and the buyer was large. Warner's had the factories and the department store accounts, and in 1937 it introduced lettered cup sizes, the system every bra label still uses.

Mary Phelps Jacob becomes Caresse Crosby

The rest of her public life belongs to publishing. As Caresse Crosby she co-founded, with the poet Harry Crosby, the Paris imprint that began as Editions Narcisse in 1927 and became the Black Sun Press in 1928. The press continued, in different forms, until 1970.

Lingerie histories remember her for one patent and one sale. The patent gave the American industry its founding document for the soft brassiere, and the sale explains why the story is usually told as Warner's, not hers.

Last updated October 7, 2026